Cellular telephones often provide the primary means of communication in emergency situations. Increased cellular phone usage by the general public, however, often results in network congestion, particularly during emergency situations. Such congestion could prevent key personnel from obtaining access to the network during an emergency, thereby delaying their responses to and resolution of the emergency.
One way to ensure access to wireless services during an emergency is to provide prioritized wireless services for key personnel. In prioritized wireless services, every user is assigned a priority level based on the importance of his or her role in resolving the emergency. Service requests from the users are queued and service is provided according to each user's priority.
An example of prioritized wireless services is the Wireless Priority Service (WPS) program developed by the Department of Homeland Security. The WPS is a White House-directed National Security/Emergency Preparedness (NS/EP) National Communications System (NCS) program dedicated to providing prioritized cellular network access for key national security and emergency response personnel. The goal of WPS is to provide an end-to-end nationwide wireless priority communications capability to key NS/EP personnel during natural or man-made disasters or emergencies that cause congestion or network outages in the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
Essentially, WPS is an enhancement to basic cellular service that allows prioritized NS/EP calls to queue for the next available service channel. The U.S. government specification for the WPS final capability defines 5 levels of priorities (priority 1-5, with priority 1 the highest priority) based on the WPS user's importance to national security. To request WPS services, a user needs to dial *272 and then the destination number. The user's call is then sent to its nearby base station (BS) and mobile switching center (MSC) and is queued for an available radio channel according to the user's priority. A complete description of WPS can be found in “Wireless Priority Service (WPS) Industry Requirements for the Full Operating Capability (FOC) for CDMA-based Systems,” Issue 1.0, March 2003, the contents of which are hereby incorporated in its entirety as reference.
A drawback of the above WPS is that it only supports Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)-based wireless networks. As a result, users of mobile devices based on other multiple access protocols, such as Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), or mobile devices operating in an analog mode will not have access to WPS services due to the technological differences behind these protocols and their air interfaces. Although CDMA-based networks are gaining popularity, the number of analog/TDMA users is still significant. In order to provide complete WSP services to all users, there is therefore a need to develop methods and systems that extend WPS services to mobile devices and wireless networks that do not operate according to CDMA-based protocols.
Furthermore, a WPS request may be queued for too long before being processed. As a result, the mobile sending the WPS request may drop the call before being assigned a radio channel. There is therefore another need to provide a method and system that could reduce the “queuing time” of WPS requests.